Right Opposition

Another major split in the international Communist movement was that between Stalin and the Right Opposition. In several countries parallel Communist parties were formed that either were rejected by the Comintern or distanced themselves from it. Their criticism did in some ways become similar to positions raised by the Trotskyists, but as a tendency they were far less coherent. The Right Opposition developed contacts with other groups that did not fit into either the international Social democracy or Comintern, such as the Independent Labour Party in Britain. This tendency largely died out at the time of the Second World War. In other cases dissident Marxist trends developed outside of the established Communist movement, such as the Anushlian Marxists in India.

Đilas, particularly, wrote extensively against Stalinism and was radically critical of the bureaucratic apparatus built by Bolshevism in Soviet Union. He later grew critical of his own regime as well and became a dissident in Yugoslavia. He was imprisoned but later pardoned.

Non-Communist Left

"Non-Communist Left", or NCL, was a designation used in the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) referring mainly to leftist intellectuals who had become disillusioned by Stalin.[9]Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. highlighted the group's growing power in a popular 1948 essay titled "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center", making a case for a permanent end to the Left as a unified bloc.[10] Another key publication was The God that Failed (1948), a compilation of essays from six former communists.

A major international strain of anti-Stalinism was sponsored by the CIA

The NCL began to lose its cohesion and its appeal to the CIA during the radicalism of the late 1960s. Opposition to the Vietnam War fractured the coalition, and 1967 revelations of CIA funding (by Ramparts and others) were embarrassing for many of the intellectuals involved. Soon after the story broke, Braden (with tacit support from the CIA) wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post which exposed CIA involvement with the Non-Communist Left and organized labor.[17][18] Some argued that this article represented an intentional and final break of the CIA with the NCL.[19]

^"Brockway... sought to articulate a socialism distinct from the pragmatism of Labour and the Stalinism of the "Communist Party".David Howell, "Brockway, (Archibald) Fenner, Baron Brockway" in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography : From the earliest times to the year 2000. ISBN 019861411X (Volume Seven, pp. 765-6)

^Paul Corthorn, In the shadow of the dictators: the British Left in the 1930s. Tauris Academic Studies, 2006, ISBN 1850438439, (p. 125).

^"From well before the Algerian war the Communists in particular held against Camus not so much his anti-Stalinism as his growing refusal to share political "positions" or get into public arguments..." Quoted in Tony Judt,The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2007ISBN 0226414191 (p. 92)

^Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 62–63. "The Agency had been toying with an idea for a while now: who better to fight the Communists than former Communists? In consultation with Koestler, this idea now began to take shape. The destruction of the Communist mythos, he argued, could only be achieved by mobilizing those figures on the left who were non-Communist in a campaign of persuasion. The people of whom Koestler spoke were already designated as a group—the Non-Communist Left—in the State Department and intelligence circles."

^Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 162. "The headquarters of 'professional' anti-Stalinism was the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the magazines whose editors who sat on its board, namely Commentary, the New Leader and Partisan Review."

^Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), p 121. "Sartre was the enemy not just because of his position on Communism, but because he preached a doctrine (or anti-doctrine) of individualism which rubbed against the federalist 'family of man' society which America, through organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was promoting. (The Soviet Union, by the way, found Sartre equally uncongenial, branding existentialism 'a nauseating and putrid concoction.')"

^Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 401–402. "Richard Helms, who was now director of the CIA, was, according to Rostow's memo, aware of the article, and conceivably of its contents also. The CIA had ample time to invoke its secrecy agreement with Braden, and prevent him publishing the piece."

Further reading

Alan WaldThe New York Intellectuals, The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. 440 pp (See review by Paul LeBlanchere)